TOP fertility doctors want to lift the ban on parents choosing the sex of their baby – saying couples should have the right to pick “a pink one rather than a blue one”.

In evidence to MPs three senior fertility specialists insisted that allowing sex selection would not be a “slippery slope” towards designer babies, as few parents would want to choose.

Dr Gillian Lockwood, medical director at Midland Fertility Services, in Walsall, one of the oldest IVF clinics in the country, said there was unlikely to be a rush by parents to create “a football team or a girls’ choir” – not least because the IVF process involved is expensive, uncomfortable and has a relatively low chance of success.

But she defended the right of some parents who wanted to choose – citing the case of a Scottish couple with four sons who lost their baby daughter in an accident and wanted another girl.

Dr Lockwood also warned that some couples were effectively already choosing the sex of their baby, by having an abortion if scans showed the foetus was the “wrong” gender. In some parts of the country hospitals refuse to tell parents about their baby’s gender, even if it can be detected on a scan.

She said: “I do not think anybody would say, ‘Once we let them have sex selection, everybody is going to want to go boy, boy, girl.’

“If any couple are so determined to have one gender rather than another that they are prepared to put themselves through the miserable, uncomfortable, expensive and chancy business of having the necessary treatment, then good luck to them.

“The alternative is much worse and that is what we are seeing. Couples go ahead, get pregnant, have a scan and then a termination.

The issue of sex selection will be considered in the Government’s Human Tissues and Embryos Bill, which will be introduced in the next session of Parliament.

So far the Government has indicated that it wishes to retain the ban on selection. Former Health Minister Caroline Flint told a committee examining the Bill last month that lifting the ban would send out mixed messages to countries like China and India where a traditional preference for boys has led to an estimated 60million abortions of girl foetuses.

At the same time she confirmedthat women visiting fertility clinics will not be required to demonstrate that they have considered a child’s need for a father.

It was “impractical and super­­fluous” as the law already allowed single women and lesbians to undergo IVF, argued Ms Flint.

Dr Lockwood agreed that the existing rule made no sense. “A quarter of all babies go home from the maternity ward with their mother to a fatherless household, and only 14 per cent of babies do not have a father’s name on the birth certificate,” she revealed.

“We may prefer the ‘Janet and John’ world in which there is a mother and father, a boy and a girl and a dog named Spot,” she added. “But the real world is one of women deciding to have a baby on their own or being left pregnant.

“I do not think we should put IVF treatment in some little hallowed glass box and try to make everybody better than the rest of society.”

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